Opinion: Why the New Zealand poll experiment matters to Australia

So what does the remarkable election outcome in New Zealand really mean for Australians? Does it matter to us who governs across the Tasman?

Surely the result means even less than the peculiarities of the South Australian system. The Liberals there can get 53 per cent of the two-party preferred vote and still not form government.

In WA in the old days, something like that was called a gerrymander (wrongly) and cause for much Labor angst until they changed the electoral laws, but even a landslide here still can’t win the Legislative Council on the new rules the party created.

And in NZ you can beat your opponent soundly, but lose government, if there’s a maverick like Winston Peters holding a few seats outside the major parties.

New Zealand’s result is a neat distillation of modern society where disruption is to be embraced for being, well, disruptive.

Whether it brings about widespread societal benefit is yet to be seen.

So the Kiwis have now become a political and social experiment. And that’s why this election might actually matter — to us. Because we may well be next in the laboratory.

Some commentators see this poll mirroring Australia’s 2007 election. That’s only right to a very limited extent.

As the Menzies Research Centre’s Nick Cater put it: “In a period of near-universal political volatility, it raises the dispiriting possibility that simply governing well may no longer be enough.”

On that measure, there are similar sentiments afoot to 2007. And didn’t that turn out well? Through that prism, politics becomes a version of Survivor.

Governments get voted off the island because we’re bored with just doing well.

People want something new, or they get impatient for second-order priorities, prepared to push aside the first-order issues that really matter.

But I suspect NZ is not running 10 years behind us, but is actually a few years in front.

The Kiwis have been ahead of us in politics for some time.

Economic rationalist reforms in Australia followed well behind the so-called Rogernomics of the 1980s and 90s.

So it’s likely that any splashback from those transformative policies would have a similar lag.

What happened in NZ two weeks ago looks like a resurgence in socialist aspirations which is never far below the surface there.

Generations of Kiwis grew up infected with the promise of pre-war Labour prime minister Michael Savage that the government would look after them “from the cradle to the grave”.

NZ Labour’s new look has got more to do with the international movement elevating the likes of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn and a nostalgic longing for that sort of welfare statism than with Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard.

Back in 2007, the Australian duo was offering economically conservative government with Rudd trying to look as much like John Howard as possible, while pinching his job.

New Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is offering Kiwis old-fashioned socialism with a modern face on the premise that capitalism is broken.

In her first long interview after winning, Ardern was asked if capitalism had failed low-income Kiwis:

“If you have hundreds of thousands of children living in homes without enough to survive, that’s a blatant failure. What else could you describe it as?”

Well, I’d describe it as hyperbole. If they haven’t got enough to survive they would be dying.

Cater quotes the figures:

“Nine years ago GDP per capita in New Zealand was 30 per cent lower than in Australia, now the gap has narrowed to 19 per cent.”

But, according to 37-year-old Ardern, a former head of the International Union of Socialist Youth, this economic recovery has been a failure of capitalism.

“When you have a market economy, it all comes down to whether or not you acknowledge where the market has failed and where intervention is required,” she said.

“Has it failed our people in recent times? Yes. How can you claim you’ve been successful when you have growth roughly 3 per cent, but you’ve got the worst homelessness in the developed world?”

An inquiry by the New Zealand Herald found Labour was using a very broad definition of homelessness by international standards and judged that claim “mostly fiction”.

While Labour used a university study showing 41,000 people were “severely housing deprived” — meaning sleeping rough, living in cars or garages, or in emergency or temporary shelters — official government figures for those “without habitable accommodation” was about 4000.

These themes were echoed by Peters when justifying his decision to bypass the Nationals who won 44.45 per cent of the vote and to install Labour which polled just 36.89 and only 43.16 when combined with the supportive Greens.

“For too many New Zealanders, capitalism has not been their friend but their foe,” Peters said.

So where are the socialist success stories Ardern and Peters are following?

Or does she intend to recreate the socialist wheel?

With corners perhaps, to make sure everyone gets a decent turn on top.

The Left usually points to a few Scandinavian countries as they scratch around for winning models, but Sweden, Norway and Denmark are mixed capitalist economies with strong welfare spending often bolstered by North Sea fossil fuel riches.

Why did China and Russia turn away from socialism, along with the rest of the Iron Curtin countries? Because it didn’t work. Or should we look to Cuba and Venezuela?

The NZ Nationals got debt down to 38 per cent of GDP compared to Australia’s 47 per cent. Watch that figure skyrocket.

Ardern is promising to build hundreds of thousands of homes, make university education free, lift wages for all workers, increase handouts to low-income families and push up paid parental leave.

No one is yet screaming: Show me the money. Or show us the debt, more likely.

Peters ominously noted last week that the world and NZ economies were slowing and said people shouldn’t blame him for “dark days ahead”.